Not much action in the markets on Veterans Day. So let’s go back to our story… At the Kilkenomics economics festival in Kilkenny, Ireland… We had just taken the first hit. It was an informal debate, in front of a crowd of drunken Irishmen. And our opponent was already way ahead. He had won over the audience with a well-argued series of blasts. We charged our guns… making notes on the back of an envelope. We prepared to fire back. But our opponent had also laid a thick smokescreen over the whole area. So many misconceptions…

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” said Balzac. Before the age of capitalism – which gave people the means to build their fortunes without taking anything away from others – that was largely true. So, what lay behind the fortune which Anthony van Sallee used to buy up much of Long Island, New York, in the 17th century: larceny, murder, slavery? All of the above. This ancestor to the Vanderbilts… to the Whitneys… and through their mother to our own children was, in the language of Baltimore’s street life, “one mean motherf*****.”

We’ve come to the charming city of Kilkenny in Ireland to speak at Europe’s first economics festival: Kilkenomics. What exactly an economics festival is we don’t know. But according to the man who runs Kilkenomics, Irish economist and author David McWilliams, it brings some of the world’s leading economists, financial analysts and media commentators together with some of Ireland’s sharpest standup comedians… and has been described by The Australian newspaper as “Davos with jokes.”

Wowee! More highs in the stock market. The Dow rose 128 points yesterday. Is the US stock market headed for a bubble? Maybe… but what do we know? Our guess is that the people who are buying stocks today have a lot more confidence in the Fed than we have. As near as we can tell, today’s stock prices owe a lot to the Fed’s manipulation of asset prices and little to the fact that the companies are more intrinsically valuable… or more likely to produce higher earnings per share. In fact, as Chris reported yesterday, earnings-per-share estimates have been falling as US stocks have been rising.